Designer uses VR to design award-winning prototype carry-on bag. When it was released in 2016, Tilt Brush was heralded as VR’s killer app. A tool that has been used to create magnificent virtual paintings—Google even started an artist in residence initiative—much of the program’s hype focused on its ability to create beautiful landscapes and quirky

An official release for the Oculus Quest is scheduled for 2019. Released back in March of 2016, Virtual Desktop is a handy utility application that allows users the ability to view and access their desktop computer from the comfort of their Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, or WMR headset. Previously available strictly on PC VR headsets, creator

War Dust features twice as many players as Stand Out: VR Battle Royale with 64 total and includes vehicles, large objective-based maps, and more to try and make your Battlefield VR dreams a reality. It’s just now in Early Access on Steam (on sale for $14.99 right now) and is quite rough around the edges, but it’s certainly nailed the thrill of large-scale combat already.

We’ll be playing War Dust on Rift using a two Touch controllers. We’re starting right around 9:30 AM PT and we’ll aim to last for around an hour or more. We’ll be livestreaming directly to the UploadVR Twitch page where you can interact with us directly and chat among yourselves. Streaming is something we’re going to double down on doing more often very soon so you should get in on the ground floor of our Twitch community early! You can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:

Watch live video from UploadVR on www.twitch.tv

You can see our most recent past archived streams over on the UploadVR YouTube channel right here. There’s lots of good stuff there!

Let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next and don’t forget to follow the Twitch channel and sign up for notifications.

PC VR headset owners have a few new reasons to pick up the rhythm slashing game Beat Saber with the 0.12.0 update today.

The highly anticipated update is likely to break custom songs and we have yet to test whether they can be reinstalled, so proceed with the update with caution if modding the game and adding custom songs is important to you.

The update adds an Expert+ difficulty in standard mode for the included songs as well as new sabers and “New modifiers to spice the gameplay and to add multiplier to your final score.” The update also includes a practice mode that lets you “start at any time of the song and also set it’s speed.”

Those are the main changes, but the update also includes “New in-game UI for song progress, relative score, immediate rank and Full Combo indicator” as well as optimizations and performance updates.

While this update is specifically for the PC version of Beat Saber, we’ll also note this isn’t the only news related to the game today. We learned today also that PlayStation VR version of Beat Saber will be bundled alongside Borderlands 2 VR in December. While the PSVR version of the game won’t have custom songs, it did launch with additional music and regular new content packs are promised for the title.

Blizzard employees have told Kotaku that the company is developing a Warcraft-themed augmented reality game for smartphones. The game is reportedly inspired by Pokémon GO, the hit AR game which many at Blizzard apparently play.

Pokémon GO, launched in 2016, is the most successful AR game of all-time. According to market research firm Apptopia, the game has over 50 million players and made over $2 billion in revenue. The game uses the phone’s GPS to overlay Pokémon on a stylized map of the real world which the player must physically traverse. When a Pokémon is encountered, the phone switches to AR mode.

There’s no information yet on exactly how a Warcraft-themed entry to this genre would work. Perhaps the “mobs” from World of Warcraft (that’s the monsters and beasts which spawn around the world) would be encountered and battled in a manner similar to the MMO. A more likely scenario however seems to be that Blizzard would use the “battle pets” system from WoW or some variation of the original Warcraft’s top-down strategy elements. Pets have been in the MMO since vanilla, but in 2012 Blizzard added the ability for players to battle their pets, almost exactly like Pokémon battles. If Blizzard wants to replicate the success of Pokémon GO, the two games might end up with very similar gameplay.

Unfortunately, there are no reports of Blizzard working on a VR title, or adding VR support to World of Warcraft. However last year, an unofficial fan project showed us what this would look like using the Unity game engine, and we were highly impressed with the sheer sense of scale and wonder this demonstrated.

Pokémon GO popularized smartphone AR gaming, and other major franchises with collectible creatures now want a share of this new market. With a Harry Potter AR game launching in 2019, new entries from Ghostbusters and Jurassic World, as well as Blizzard working on theirs too, it looks like the genre is only going to get bigger. The question is: will these new entries be able to replicate the success of Pokémon GO, or will they suffer the fate of many hit imitations in gaming’s past? We’ll likely find out in 2019.

Vertigo announced the news today, confirming the game would arrive in early 2019. The game is a mix of both turn-based and real-time strategy in which players control armies and build bases, preparing to head into battle and claim victory over the enemy. It offers 1v1 online multiplayer for friends to prove their strategic supremacy in.

You can check out the reveal trailer below. Vertigo hasn’t confirmed if there will be any new additions to the PSVR version just yet.

Skyworld was originally introduced around the reveal of the HTC Vive back in 2015, but didn’t end up releasing until about a year after its ever-popular zombie shooter. Despite giving Arizona Sunshine our 2016 game of the year, though, we felt like Skyworld was a step backward for Vertigo.

“Skyworld has some good ideas, but ultimately its full potential is unrealized,” we wrote in our review. “I applaud Vertigo for trying something new, but when it comes down to it, VR doesn’t really enhance a board game and simple strategy experience like this, and it often became more tedious and convoluted than fun.”

Disney has shown off an internal tool for posing and animating 3D models from inside VR. Called PoseVR, the tool is an experimental project exploring the potential of VR for 3D creation. Disney has not indicated that this will be released or even further developed.

Disney describes the tool as:

Removing inefficiency and distractions to allow artists to focus on their craft is one of our core tenets that drives innovation. PoseVR is an experimental project established to demonstrate the potential of VR as a tool to pose and animate CG characters.

A multidisciplinary team composed of engineers and animators developed and tested PoseVR to invent a functioning, posable rig in VR and to test assumptions on design and workflow. This informed us how to expand our current workflows while also showing the benefits and potential of VR for our future animation toolsets.

Animation was also a core focus of MARUI’s VR plugins for Maya and Blender. Using your hands to directly manipulate parts of the model that should move can be far more intuitive than the current approach of trying to move and rotate elements in 3D space with a mouse & keyboard.

Companies across the 3D creation industry are coming to the same conclusion: VR is perfectly suited for animation. While this tool isn’t being released publicly, we expect many like it to emerge in the coming years. This is a workflow which VR will almost certainly disrupt.